===rant

So I have been freelancing as web developer for 5 years. I was also playing basketball professionally so I was only working part-time, building websites here and there, small android apps to learn the job and I was also reading a lot to challenge my brain.

When I stopped playing basketball about a year ago, I thought I would really enjoy coding full time so I pursued a job.

With no formal education and just a basketball background on paper, in the collapsed Greek economy, as you may assume chances of landing a job are minimal.

After about 40 resumes sent I only got an internship. It was a 4 month, part-time, no pay deal, and then the company would decide if they would like to hire me later.

The company had 4 employees and they are one of the largest software distribution businesses in my area. They resell SaaS bought from a third company, bundled with installation support, initial configuration, hardware support, whatever a client may need.

I was the only one with any ability to code whatsoever. The other people were working mostly on customer support with the occasional hardware repair.

After the 4 month period they owner (small company, owner was also manager and other roles) told me that they are very happy with my work and would like to keep me part-time with minimum pay.

Just to give you and idea if the amounts of money involved, in Greece, after taxes, my salary was 240euros per month. And the average cost of surviving (rent, cheapest food possible, no expenses on anything but super basics) is about 600euros.

I told him I needed more to live and he told me ok, we will reevaluate a few months later, at the end of May 2017.

I just accepted it without having many options. The company after all was charging clients 30euros per hour for my projects so I kept thinking that if I worked a lot and delivered consistently I would get a full time job and decent money.

And I delivered. In the following months I made a Magento extension, some WordPress themes, a C# application to extract data from the client's ERP and import it to a third application, a click to call application to use Asterisk to originate calls from the client's ERP, a web application to manage a restaurant's menu and many more small projects. Whatever they asked, I delivered.

On time, version controlled, heavily documented solutions (my C# ones are not exactly masterpieces but it was my first time with the language and windows).

So when May ended I was pretty excited to hear they wanted to keep me full time. I worked hard for it, I was serious, professional, I tried a lot to learn things so I can deliver, and the company recognized that. YAY.

So the time comes to talk money. The offer was 480euros per month. Double my part-time pay, minimum wage. I asked for about 700. Manager said it's hard but I will see what I can do. So we agreed to keep the deal for June while they are working on a better offer.

During the first half of June I finished my last project, put all my work on a nice folder with a nice readme on every project's directory, with their version control and everything.

The offer never improved, so I said no deal, and as of today, I am jobless.

I am stressed as fuck and excited as fuck at the same time.

I will do my best to survive in the shitstorm that is called Greece.

Bring it on.

Boss's son (who, despite being 19 and having no formal education or experience, was head of the technical team, consisting of one ops guys, one part-time web developer, and one part-time data entry/programmer) brought a cross bow to work. Just strolled in with it one day and took it back to his office, walking past all the visibly uncomfortable employees. One of the marketing ladies said to him "wow that's a bit scary" but it had no effect. He also wore a trench coat and kept a flying squirrel in a sock in his pocket.

At another place (not doing dev work) I had my manger tell me to type more slowly to get all my hours in, as I was promised 20/wk but they had about 3 hours of work for me to do. I quit after a month.

I've been fairly lucky with my bosses of late since I've progressed in my programming career. But my absolute worst boss was when I first started working in an office environment doing data entry. My boss at the time was terrible, and she was always against innovation or process improvement. She also always tried to make herself look good and taking credit for the accomplishments of others. If she screwed up it was your fault, and she was "always buried in email" so she could never respond to you for pto requests, or escalation of issues between departments. My whole family pretty much worked in various roles in the department and she fired my brother after my mother left the company for no reason, saying he was "sleeping", but I worked right next to him and he's tall and had to slouch just to comfortable see his computer screen since the same manager refused to approve work station improvements for him.

Our workflow was to receive daily spreadsheets of health care claims that we had to manually process and enter into the system. So being the lazy innovator that I am, and trying to find ways I can efficiently work, I delved into studying visual basic and programmed a few functions and tools in excel to analyze, highlight, and process some of the data since the claims on the spreadsheets always had a specific pattern. This was all before I had any formal education in computer science so the program was very basic and clunky but it tripled my efficiency. When I brought it up to my boss to spread it among the rest of our team so they could use it after a short 20 minute training, she struck it down saying any training or use of it would be a waste of resources since it was too technical and complex to be used and if I were to keep improving it or use it I would be fired. It was literally copy and paste from one spreadsheet to the other en masse and clicking a button to sort and fill in the blanks. Eventually I showed it to the director of the department when working on a large data entry project with her, and I was later offered a job as a technical analyst where I was responsible for the codebase that generated the reports for the department and specifically all the reports my old boss used where I would occasionally mess with her to get back at all the crap she gave me and my brother. Since all the reports were blind carbon copied to everyone, I would send out her reports on a delay while everyone else got them on time. It eventually got her in so much crap she had to step down as a manager. She still works in the same company that I started working at again earlier this year, and like the many careers she's ruined she eventually ruined her own within the company 😂

I really am grateful to be a software engineer.

Being a software engineer here in my country really is wonderful. We're very short on software engineering and IT professionals, so we could quite easily make 2 to 4, even 5 times average salary, and most of us don't even have to worry about getting fired because we can quite easily get a new job in a matter of weeks.

I'm really, really grateful. And I intend to give back to the community by enabling those without access to formal education in IT to learn a bit about software engineering by sharing my knowledge freely in my blog. I hope I can keep consistent in this. Wish me luck!

being told to lead a team of junior developers for a project when i was 18

i never had any formal CS education so i thought the management was joking, but a week after, i was called into a meeting with the junior developers and we were tasked with a project that needs to be completed within 4 months, with me as the lead

the project was successful and after that im occasionally given the task to lead a project every now and then

this happened a few years ago and its still the most confidence-boosting experience ever happened to me, the things i learned during those 4 months are still applicable to my career today

It's not always true that degree holders hate self-taught developers. Sometimes, it's the other way around. When somebody mentions he gained a cs degree, he sometimes gets hate, too, hearing "degrees are useless! yadayada..." like it's a sin to have one. We should never stop learning whether we have a degree or not, and we should stop this hate and divided culture.

I had a meeting today with some high level technical executives from IBM and I showed them our architecture and they were impressed and said it was rare that they saw start-ups with such great architecture. As a dev with no formal education and one year experience this makes me so proud and also very proud of my team

"How useful was your CS degree and why?" - I studied CS at university, my education always was incredibly useful.

Firstly, the knowledge you gain in itself is useful. Furthermore, we explain and understand the unknown in terms of the known. Thus, the more you know, the easier you learn new things.

But secondly and more importantly, university teaches you *how* to think. In a structured way, like a scientist or engineer. To see the bigger picture.

I originally wanted to end here, but I've read a couple of entries doubting the usefulness of any CS degree.

Our profession isn't all that different from others. It is, however, relatively young. How's this for an analogy: We're still in the stage of building sand castles. That's fine, and can be self taught. But in years to come we'll want to build bridges and sky scrapers, which are not just "sand castles scaled up". Our sand castle knowledge won't help us here. Sky scrapers need entirely different materials and a good understanding of architectural statics.

Can you still teach that yourself? Maybe. Will a formal education with a degree be useful and generally more trusted? I bet.

!rant
Just signed a contract as a full-time web developer at Mid-Norway's largest productions house.
Prior 6 months as an apprentice, no prior formal education, self-taught since the age of 12, and I'm 20 now.

I see myself needing a stress ball in the future

I am a 29 year old with about 10 years of development experience under my belt. I have what most would consider to be a senior level job that pays well for someone who is self taught and never attended college or university.

Recently I have had the urge to obtain a formal education. I don't really have any need or reason to, but the urge is still there.

I know there are a ton of respectable and very talented devs without diplomas. Any of you ever regret not perusing a degree? Would you see any benefit it pursing one late in your career?

to all of you out there scared to get into a Dev position because of no formal education:

I don't have any finished formal education, just a bunch of experience from pet projects and free lance here and there. I applied for a position this morning, got an email before the afternoon with an invitation for an interview!

companies are looking for brains, not pieces of paper. just take the jump and try!

Designer: These nine logo's come after the intro text...

Me: Wait... nine? How do we know the number of company logo's in that section is always nine?

Designer: Well that looks the best.

Me: That may be, but we're working with CMS content here. We cannot be sure that this company works for exactly nine clients.

Designer: What do you mean?

Me: In general the idea is that a CMS allows a customer to determine that for themselves. That is kind of what a Content Management System does.

Designer: But shouldn't I, the Designer, be in control of that? Nine logo's simply looks the best!

Me (trying to cope with the fact this guy's formal education is a joke compared to his ego): The reality is that the client being able to determine his own content is the reason we make this website. We will have to take into account the actual number of items in the CMS may be less or more. We could paginate it or randomize it if you want to use that grid of nine.

Designer: I don't see why I can't determine that.

Me: Designing around those constraints is what my boss hired you to do.

If you are one of all those awesome developers and hackers and I only understand 20% of your rants then props to you and keep scrolling :-D

But if you are a young developer, fresh grad or just learning programming I have an idea, how about a mentor?

This literally just pop in my head right now while cleaning my kitchen!

I'd be learning along your side and also having lots of fun! I don't have any formal experience providing mentoring but have some education credits and patience.

I'm gonna stop the sales pitch because it's annoying even me! but Idk, i just thought that maybe there's someone else out there interested in mentoring services :P

Alright. This is going to be long and incoherent, so buckle up. This is how I lost my motivation to program or to do anything really.

Japan is apparently experiencing a shortage of skilled IT workers. They are conducting standardized IT skill tests in 7 Asian countries including mine. Very few people apply and fewer actually pass the exam. There are exams of different levels that gives you better roles in the IT industry as you pass them. For example, the level 2 or IT Fundamental Engineering Exam makes you an IT worker, level 3 = capable of working on your own...so on.
I passed level 1 and came in 3rd in my country (there were only 78 examinees lol). Level 2 had 2 parts. The theoretical mcq type exam in the morning and the programming mcq in the afternoon. They questions describe a scenario/problem, gives you code that solves it with some parts blanked out.

I passed the morning exam and not the afternoon. As a programmer I thought I'd be good at the afternoon exam as it involves actual code. Anyway, they give you 2 more chances to pass the afternoon exam, failing that, you'll have to take both of them the next time. Someone who has passed 1 part is called a half-passer and I was one.

A local company funded by both JICA and my government does the selection and training for the Japanese companies. To get in you have to pass a written exam(write code/pseudocode on paper) and pass the final interview in which there are 2 parts - technical interview and general interview.

I went as far as the interview. Didn't do too good in the technical interview. They asked me how would I find the lightest ball from 8 identical balls using a balance only twice. You guys probably already know the solution. I don't have much theoritical knowledge. I know how to write code and solve problems but don't know formal name of the problem or the algorithm.

On to the next interview. I see 2 Japanese interviewers and immediately blurt out konichiwa! The find it funny. Asked me about my education. Say they are very impressed that self taught and working. The local HR guy is not impressed. Asks me why I left university and why never tried again. Goes on about how the dean is his friend and universites are cheap. foryou.jpg

The real part. So they tell me that Japanese companies pay 250000/month, I will have to pay 60% income tax, pay for my own accommodation, food, transportation cost etc. Hella sweet deal. Living in Japan! But I couldn't get in because the visa is only given to engineers. Btw I'm not looking to invade Japan spread my shitskin seed and white genocide the japs. Just wanted to live in another country for a while and learn stuff from them.

I'll admit I am a little salty and probably will remain salty forever. But this made me lose all interest in programming. It's like I don't belong. A dropout like me should be doing something lowly. Maybe I should sell drugs or be a pimp or something.

But sometimes I get this short lived urge to make something brilliant and show them that people like me are capable of doing good things. Fuck, do I have daddy issues?

Ive reached a point where seeing the telegram logo with the little santa hat makes me so happy that i smile for hours because everything else sucks so much. Can we just burn formal education to the ground and only hire <30yro people as professors?

i think formal education is the best, because it teaches good practices and all the whys of programming. it requires a lot of discipline and effort, but actually sitting down and studying theory is good for us

I seriously hate it when people expect me to know every. Single. Thing. About their computer just because I know how to format a usb... Honestly I think the lack of formal computer education in schools (at least in America) is gonna screw us over in the long run...🤔

A /thread.

I have to say something important. As the story progresses, the rage will keep fueling up and get more spicy. You should also feel your blood boil more. If not, that's because you're happy to be a slave.

This is a clusterfuck story. I'll come back and forth to some paragraphs to talk about more details and why everything, INCLUDING OUR DEVELOPER JOBS ARE A SCAM. we're getting USED as SLAVES because it's standardized AS NORMAL. IT IS EVERYTHING *BUT* NORMAL.

START:

As im watching the 2022 world cup i noticed something that has enraged me as a software engineer.

The camera has pointed to the crowd where there were old football players such as Rondinho, Kaka, old (fat) Ronaldo and other assholes i dont give a shit about.

These men are old (old for football) and therefore they dont play sports anymore.

These men don't do SHIT in their lives. They have retired at like 39 years old with MULTI MILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN THEIR BANK ACCOUNT.

And thats not all. despite of them not doing anything in life anymore, THEY ARE STILL EARNING MILLIONS AND MILLIONS OF DOLLARS PER MONTH. FOR WHAT?????

While i as a backend software engineer get used as a slave to do extreme and hard as SHIT jobs for slave salary.

500-600$ MAX PER MONTH is for junior BACKEND engineers! By the law of my country software businesses are not allowed to pay less than $500 for IT jobs. If thats for backend, imagine how much lower is for frontend? I'll tell you cause i used to be a frontend dev in 2016: $200-400 PER MONTH IS FOR FRONTEND DEVELOPERS.

A BACKEND SOFTWARE ENGINEER with at least 7-9 years of professional experience, is allowed to have $1000-2000 PER MONTH

In my country, if you want to have a salary of MORE THAN $3000/Month as SOFTWARE ENGINEER, you have to have a minimum of Master's Degree and in some cases a required PhD!!!!!!

Are you fucking kidding me?

Also. (Btw i have a BSc comp. sci. Degree from a valuable university) I have taken a SHIT ton of interviews. NOT ONE OF THEM HAVE ASKED ME IF I HAVE A DEGREE. NO ONE. All HRs and lead Devs have asked me about myself, what i want to learn and about my past dev experience, projects i worked on etc so they can approximate my knowledge complexity.

EVEN TOPTAL! Their HR NEVER asked me about my fycking degree because no one gives a SHIT about your fucking degree. Do you know how can you tell if someone has a degree? THEY'LL FUCKING TELL YOU THEY HAVE A DEGREE! LMAO! It was all a Fucking scam designed by the Matrix to enslave you and mentally break you. Besides wasting your Fucking time.

This means that companies put degree requirement in job post just to follow formal procedures, but in reality NO ONE GIVES A SHIT ABOUT IT. NOOBOODYYY.

ALSO: I GRADUATED AND I STILL DID NOT RECEIVE MY DEGREE PAPER BECAUSE THEY NEED AT LEAST 6 MONTHS TO MAKE IT. SOME PEOPLE EVEN WAITED 2 YEARS. A FRIEND OF MINE WHO GRADUATED IN FEBRUARY 2022, STILL DIDNT RECEIVE HIS DEGREE TODAY IN DECEMBER 2022. ALL THEY CAN DO IS PRINT YOU A PAPER TO CONFIRM THAT I DO HAVE A DEGREE AS PROOF TO COMPANIES WHO HIRE ME. WHAT THE FUCK ARE THEY MAKING FOR SO LONG, DIAMONDS???

are you fucking kidding me? You fucking bitch. The sole paper i can use to wipe my asshole with that they call a DEGREE, at the end I CANT EVEN HAVE IT???

Fuck You.

This system that values how much BULLSHIT you can memorize for short term, is called "EDUCATION", NOT "MEMORIZATION" System.

Think about it. Don't believe be? Are you one of those nerds with A+ grades who loves school and defends this education system? Here I'll fuck you with a single question: if i gave you a task to solve from linear algebra, or math analysis, probabilistics and statistics, physics, or theory, or a task to write ASM code, would you know how to do it? No you won't. Because you "learned" that months or years ago. You don't know shit. CHECK MATE. You can answer those questions by googling. Even the most experienced software engineers still use google. ALL of friends with A+ grades always answered "i dont know" or "i dont remember". HOW IF YOU PASSED IT WITH A+ 6 DAYS AGO? If so, WHY THE FUCK ARE WE WASTING YEARS OF AN ALREADY SHORT HUMAN LIFE TO TEMPORARILY MEMORIZE GARBAGE? WHY DONT WE LEARN THAT PROCESS THROUGH WORKING ON PRACTICAL PROJECTS??? WOULDNT YOU AGREE THATS A BETTER SOLUTION, YOU MOTHERFUCKER BITCH ASS SLAVE SUCKA???

Im can't even afford to buy my First fuckinf Car with this slave salary. Inflation is up so much that 1 bag of BASIC groceries from Walmart costs $100. IF BASIC GROCERIES ARE $100, HOW DO I LIVE WITH $500-600/MONTH IF I HAVE OTHER EXPENSES?

Now, back to slavery. Here's what i learned.

1800s: slaves are directly forced to work in exchange for food to survive.

2000s: slaves are indirectly forced to work in exchange for money as a MIDDLEMAN that can be used to buy food to survive.

????

This means: slavery has not gone anywhere. Slavery has just evolved. And you're fine with it.

Will post part 2 later.

My first rant. Woohoo!

Honestly I do the whole shebang ussualy depending on what the needs are from network to servers to coding because for some reason nobody has any technical experience where I work.
I just started app development for a gamedev startup and I am in sheer awe of the amount of transpiling/compiling etc that needs to be done for an multiplatform app for iOS and android with js(x)/typescript, html, css.

I remember when I could just write some spaghetti code to make it working by following a couple of tutorials. Then refractoring and testing it for a couple of hours and be done with it. push it into production.

Now I am lost having to learn OOP, functional programming, reactjs, react native, express, webpack, mongodb, babel, and the list goes on and on...
Why not just make a new backend that does all of that in another language which supports all of that.

I have no formal education in programming/coding and the last time I learned JS it was just some if else, switches and simple dom manipulation.

I just want to get to coding a freakin' game but I have to learn JSX for the front and typescript on the backend.

I am this close to going back to ye ol' lamp stack and quitting this job. 😥

Be good at speaking! I've landed 3 dev jobs, without any formal education, merely because I'm good at talking. Bigly good!

Hi All !!!

Woah this is my first Post after 3 years not opening this website.
i don't know why.
but maybe between 2017-2020 my live got better so i don't think will have any Rant again.ahahaha *kidding

but today i see email, that i got sticker from devRant, woah i think i will go to devRant again.

wow devRant more cool than before , i don't think this website still open. i just want to check it. i forgot my password too. but luckily still got an access to my email.

So i want to tell a story about this weekly Rant,
Family Support? what the he** is it.
my family only look for money.
at my first job finding, i always pushed for find work in Factory/Oil/Goverment that will give a BIG money.
my first reaction to this i tell i won't do that. but overtime i think i will not talk about it again.
i just want to get Dev Job anywhere.
i don't know if this is the meaning of passion or something like that.
but from the first time , i try hard to get job only is software development.
and hey Maybe my Pray Listened by Almighty God.

so i got my first job as Fullstack developer that luckily accept me as self taught software developer. i don't have any formal education.
actually i only learn software dev from Lynda.com(not promotion) .
i learn algorithm, pseudocode . then i got passed the test of psudocode.

Then because the money is good in there. my parent just accept my first job. not complaining again till now..
maybe this is what they called ikigai??

i love software development so much....

but still i always have a Rant every day about it.
someday you like it, someday you hate it.
someday yo miss it, someday you regret it.

maybe that what is called Love.Damn...

My ideal dev job, would be a job I can show compassion towards. A team I can be proud of and learn from. And a vibrant workspace with likeminded individuals who just want to improve themselves even if they feel their at their pinnacle.

My current office tries to make use of new technologies, we've embedded docker, vagrant, a few ci systems on an in need basis per team, and a lot of other tools.

My only real qualms are they feel indifferent towards new languages and eco systems ( Node.js, GoLang, etc ). Our web team is still using angular.js 1.x, bower, refuses to look into webpack or a new framework for our front end which is currently being bogged down by angulars dirty checking.

Our automated quality assurance team is forced to use Python for end to end testing, I've written an extensive package to make their lives easier including an entire JavaScript interface for dispatching events and properly interacting with custom DOMs outside of the scope of the official selenium bindings.

Our RESTful services are all using flask and Python, which become increasingly slow with our increase in services. I've pushed for the use of Node or GoLang with a GraphQL interface but I'm shot down consistently by our principle engineers who believe everything and anything must be written in Python.

I could go on, but tldr; I'm 21 and I have a ton of aspirations for web development. I'd like to believe I'm well rounded for my age, especially without any formal education. I'd love to be surrounded by individuals who want the same, to learn and architect the greatest platforms and services possible.

Learning Python as a first language. Or Pascal. It's a tie between mainstream informal and obsolete formal education.

any mathematician turned devs here?

I think developers with a formal mathematical education should be the ones actually developing softwares. Ordinary developers are just good cooks who know to prepare these recipes by knowing to mix and manage the Ingredients through their experience, developing software using various libraries and frameworks, I don't understand what innovation we devs do in it, makes me feel less passionate about my work sometimes.

(I embrace the fact that being a developer requires an arstisic craftsmanship to do it properly)

I just read about the 'Learn to Code' nonsense. It seems some journalists told coal miners to learn coding for a living. Wtf.. As a person doing formal CS education after 1 year of work, i take offense for that comment. Coding jobs are dragged to the ground by these comments which imply that coding is a no skill, for everyone job. Opinions ?

Give up trying to change CS education since current formal education systems used since the prehistoric times are unable to teach CS properly. Instead, tell the students from day 1: "What you'll learn is either already outdated or will be outdated by the time you graduate. Be ready to learn stuff by yourselves or switch your major."

My master thesis is in ramble.
What I thought to be an achievable task in the beginning turns out to be very challenging.
My skill is not up to it.
The assistant prof I worked with is also not very helpful. I thought he's already familiar with the lib I will work with, turns out he's not so I have to study it by myself.
Me : **Asking question A**
Him : **Explaining B, C, D that's not really related to A. My question went unanswered.
Him giving me explanation on things that I already knew**
Me : "How about this code? Can we please focus on the code?!"
Him : **Finally explains the code so I can move forward a little**
Apparently I have to grow fangs and horns to scare people to give me what I want. :/

He and my prof are not in sync about how to solve the task.
They told me that even though I was behind my deadline (30% progress at 50% time), I still have some time before the deadline of the thesis.
The truth is, if I no longer believe that I can solve it, even if they gave me a time extension, it's going to be useless.
My motivation of finishing it is fading away. It's not a subject that I enjoy, the people I work with are not helpful.
I have been in depression for 2 months, and it's taking a toll on my health.
I am seriously considering dropping it and just let go of my master degree. There are many people who can work in IT even though they don't have proper formal education eh?

TLDR: I didn't & still not sure if it is..

I love bug hunting & fixing & figuring out how stuff works, but many will argue this is not even real programming..

Long version how I ended up programming:
Back in highschool, I was deciding between english and mathematics & computer science.. I filled in the form for the latter. Got a change of hearts but I already gave the extra/backup empty form to schoolmate..

Figured it's for the better because it's a hell to get a job as an english teacher/prof anyways + I dislike comunications with people + documentation (if any) is in english etc..

At the end of first year, I didn't even apply for all the exams because you had to have both programming 1&2 to pass or even be eligible to take the year again.. I figured I'd fail them, so once I actually passed both (& actually not with bad grades), I was fucked.. had to retake the year, which means I lost time + still had to pay the rent etc.. decided to drop out and return home and do the IT engineer course instead to at least have some formal education to help me find a job. Finished that without problems, I 'specialised' in network administration.
I got a job straight out of school as a web developer.. the irony.. got some conflicts with the boss and was terminated (material for another rant).

Later I sought out admin jobs, but got declined because I was overqualified and had programming experince. FML, right?

Ended up sending out mandatory job applications for IT administration & programming to not lose the bonuses & got called up to a meeting in the company I work for since then.

No qualifications for .net & MS technologies, but they liked my CV so the ended up setting up the interview anyway. I didn't know half of the technologies and concepts by proper name, but they figured I understand enough of the content to give me a try. A few years later, I got the most fucked up project they have because of my love for new thigs and trying to understand everything. It's aaaalmost bearable now.. still needs a lot of work, but I'm happy where I am. Saddly, I'm still second guessing if I'm doing a proper job as a dev, but they seem to be very ok with my work. (:

!rant but a question...

I know that with the vast examples/tutorials online this may not be necessary, but I wanted to ask the community if you guys/gals would recommend going back to school to get a formal CS education or if it would be a waste of time, money, and resources compared to just using web based sources? I've tried the college thing 3 times when I was younger but couldn't concentrate and lacked the discipline to focus and finish classes. But I'm a bit older now and wanted to know if you would recommend going back to school or if time would be better spent performing self-study and learning from home?

I'm still extremely new to coding and programming and only have basic knowledge of actual coding and a lot of the theoretical stuff in programming is completely foreign to me. Like for example, how to optimize code. I know that refactoring code to have a smaller more efficient footprint is always desirable, when it doesn't interfere with readability, but I'm unaware of where/how to modify code to run efficiently. Of course that may be wayyy to advanced for my use cases anyway 😂.

I'm trying to teach myself python as it seems like a great language for starting out and getting to understand the concepts of programing. Plus, it can be used directly in my line of work as well as side projects that I wanted to try my hand at.

Thank you in advance for your recommendations everyone!

Make CS introductory courses introduce more. Last year I took one in my uni to check out how was formal education in programming. They took an entire semester to teach what I learnt in about a week (about 2 hours a day of dedicated learning). They only taught python, a language you can pick up in about 6 hours of learning. To give you a sense of how slow this course was, they took TWO weeks to teach how lists work. This are university level courses in an institution that pretends to be the best in the country. Fuck that shit, they are incompetent as fuck and treat their kids as 5yo boys.

I was always into computers, ever since I was a kid. Played a lot of videogames on Windows 98 and XP, and a lot of my earliest drawings were level ideas for those games. My first encounters with code were with game creation software like GameMaker, but I barely touched the code proper outside of editing a few variables from other people's code. After that I basically forgot all about it and spent most of my teen years being a shutin.

Skip ahead to my last year of high school without much idea on what to do. I was good at math when I wasn't being a lazy shit, so between that and what my parents expected of me, I was prepared to go to university for civil engineering. However, two things changed that decision, the first being a great IT professor, when me and a friend were so far ahead, he started assigning us some harder work, and suggested we study computer science at university. The second was a super jank and obscure open-source early 2000's game that somehow still has a thriving community and is actively being developed. I stumbled upon it by chance, and after playing for a while, I submitted a balance change on the GitHub repo. Even though it was just a single variable change, that time I got it. That time I saw how powerful programming could be and what could be done with it. I submitted PR after PR of new features, changes and bugfixes, by the time I left there I had a somewhat solid grasp of the fundamentals of programming, and decided to enrol in the computer science degree.

Enrolling was possibly the best decision I ever made (not america; debt isn't an issue), as well as giving me actual social skills, every course I took just clicked. The knowledge I already somewhat intuitively had a vague grasp on from videogames, general computer use and collaborating with russian coders who produced the jankiest shit that was still somehow functional was expanded upon and consolidated with a high-quality formal education. Four years later and I'm fresh out of uni, it was a long road between when the seed was first planted in my mind and now, but I've finally found out what I want to do with my life.

won't know for sure until i find a job though ffs

Company policies when it comes to hiring in Norway is super strict. Being a self-taught developer for over 10 years and I still can't even land an interview because I don't have a formal education. Though this might be because I don't live in the capital and don't have a lot of chances to apply to jobs

I graduated college with double degrees in literature and marketing management. Web and software development and design was a hobby that became my way of life and eventual career path. I guess it's more of a challenge than a hurdle, not having a formal IT education as a foundation, but I'm happy to have learned a lot from my colleagues over the years to better myself as a dev in practice, if not in academics.

People pressure me to get a degree but I think which I’ll pass, I don’t care about getting into research or management and if Carmack and Romero did what they did with little formal education I guess which I can be a good enough programmer to distinguish myself in my area without it.

I'm finishing my secondary school in a few months and I'm currently unsure what exactly to do after school.
I'm pretty sure I want to become a software developer (maybe frontend UX/UI focused) already but I'm unsure what path to pursue.
As I live in Germany I have the options of either vocational training or studying at a University.
I'm pretty fed up with theoretic work and school right now so I'm tending towards vocational training as it incorporates one or two days of school with working in a company for the rest of the week.
The issue is that I will complete my A levels and therefore be eligible for university education in most relevant courses and have the feeling of wasting possible success in my future career (and maybe life experiences) if I just do the
vocational training.
As most developers here have a long experience as devs I'd like to ask you for advice.
Would you suggest studying something like applied computer science etc. to achieve a successful software developer career and higher wages or is experience more important than higher formal education at university for a developer?

So I need some advice... I've been applying for jobs as a web dev for a while now but not so much as a bite. I think a large part of this is a lack of formal education. Do you think it's worth attending a class just for the certificate? Maybe do a bootcamp? If you got hired while being self taught how did you do it?

I am currently taking a cures in leadership and teamwork as part of my computer engineering education. One assignment is to write a text about how formal and informal leaders in a team creates problems. I am sure that some of you have been in a team where the leadership have created problems and I would love to have some stories from real teams to use in my text.

So hypothetically I have a friend who wants to get a job in cyber security but has no formal education or means to afford one, at the moment. He knows enough about computers to navigate and execute most common tasks, and certainly has the drive, common sense, and brains to succeed but can't afford to in this almost cutthroat field...
How would he begin to teach himself?
He has a laptop, Kali Linux, The BTFM and RTFM books, The Hacker's Playbook 3; and the internet.

Make his day with your two cents.

Found a little magazine when I was 12 which talked about HTML.
Then later, a friend talked about VBS and VB.NET and I just started making prank shit in that...
Then later back to making websites and basically just grew from there really...

Only followed a formal education on programming once... Which I got kicked out off because I ended my first year with a splendid 2 (that 1 point for adequate attendance).
The fun part? I failed because I was too good :^)
All my grades where a 1 or a 2 because my code was made using tools and libraries that they didn't want me to touch or even know about until 3rd of 4th year...
So yea, I failed everything with the reason being: "Not according to the exercise".

Another fun part: We had to make a personal blog in the 1st year using the techniques we had learned.
Sites were published on a *public* server...
Someone hacked all sites... except mine :^)

I've come to my first real fork in my career. I currently work as a web developer for a medical software company. The pay is pretty abysmal but they're flexible and not super demanding. However, my formal education (take this with a grain of salt obviously) is in game development and I've been trying to build my portfolio and what not. I was offered a part-time internship, because I'm still in grad school, I haven't held a part time position since high school. But not only is the position a job I actually want, but the company is pretty great. I'd have to stay part time tell graduation (Next December). But they said they are already interested in transitioning me to full time once I graduate. Another note, I have to get some security clearance for the job, which is another reason they want me to start part time.

So I truly don't like web development and the company I'm at has been very up front that I'm going to stay at this pay rate for a while. But it's possible that they offer me a contract/part time position after I leave (mostly because I'm the one and only web developer and they're already on a hiring freeze). However, if they don't I'd have to scramble to find something else to pay bills for the next year.

Long rant. tl;Dr: should I stay or should I go?

A little pole. Do you think people who did not get formal education in development or Computer Sciences should be allowed to do development?